Ana Castillo

Ana Castillo is immensely insightful in every sense of the word. Her work, anything and everything written by her… must be read if one is to gain understanding of the vast landscape of soul and life lived with vitality.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves

Whether [she] is writing poetry, essays, or fiction, her work sizzles with equal measures of passion and intelligence.

— Booklist

Deliciously unpredictable…refreshing, startling… When Castillo writes about love, she reminds you of how much it matters.

— The Chicago Sun-Times

If you have read Ana Castillo’s work before, you will not be disappointed. If you have not read Castillo before–where have you been?

— The Houston Chronicle

“[The Guardians] gives America exactly what it needs–her vision of a border that most people never see…and a story that will not let us go. Her voice is singular, and her talents are on full display here. Everyone needs to visit her world.

— Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales

Ana Castillo is a warrior. She is a warrior with a brilliant mind and a wickedly witty tongue. Her take-no-prisoners view of the Chicano experience plumbs the range of Mexican and Mexican-American history, from pre-conquest to modern day. With all the skill imprinted by her Mayan ancestors, she weaves reality, the supernatural, spirituality, dualism, sexuality, sexism and classism into the warp and weft of her works. She has taken on her Chicana heritage, both defying it and defining it.

— Bi Magazine

Ana Castillo is one of our greatest thinkers. She lays out hard truths laced with brilliant optimism. Castillo is at once historian and soothsayer. We are blessed to call her our own.

In novels, short stories, poems, and essays, Ana Castillo explores what Ibis Gomez-Vega has called “those segments of the American population often separated by class, economics, gender, and sexual orientation.” Castillo’s works transcend these boundaries of politics, class, and gender, making her one of the best-known Mexican-American writers working today. Xpat Nation named her as one of the “10 Mexican-American Women You Need to Know About.” Castillo’s prose blends elements of oral history and established literary tradition with innovation and experimentation: Ilan Stavans has called her “the most daring and experimental of Latino novelists.”

Castillo’s 2008 novel The Guardians follows the lives of Mexican immigrants who illegally cross the border into the United States. Combining crushing realism with mystical transcendence, The Guardians centers on a family devastated by deaths and disappearances. Perhaps Castillo’s most lauded achievement to date, The Guardians has been called “a moving book that is both intimate and epic” (Oscar Hijuelos).

“Castillo’s incandescent novel of suffering and love traces life’s movement toward the light even in the bleakest of places.”

—Booklist

The Lambda Award-winning Give It to Me, published in 2014, was praised in Library Journal’s starred review as “entertaining from the beginning… Lives up to Castillo’s reputation of creating strong characters that defy stereotypes.” That year also marked the twentieth anniversary of Castillo’s classic collection of of Xicana essays, Massacre of the Dreamers. In celebration of this landmark, the University of New Mexico Press released a special edition of the groundbreaking book.

Castillo’s latest work, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, looks at what it means to be a single, brown, feminist parent in a world of mass incarceration, racial profiling, and police brutality. The book is “a high-wire act to bring together a combination of personality characteristics and specific cultural touchstones” (Kirkus). Through startling humor and love, Castillo weaves intergenerational stories traveling from Mexico City to Chicago. And in doing so, she narrates some of America’s most heated political debates and urgent social injustices through the oft-neglected lens of motherhood and family.

Raised in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago, Castillo credits the powerful storytelling tradition of her Mexican heritage as the foundation and inspiration for her writing. By the time she graduated from college, Castillo had already begun to establish herself as a dynamic poetic voice: she published poems in anthologies and magazines as a college student, and three volumes of poetry followed shortly thereafter. In the mid-1980s, Castillo turned to fiction. So Far From God, her first novel to be widely read, was published in 1993. Subsequent books include the short story collection Loverboys, which Booklist called “defiant, satirically hilarious, sexy, and wise,” and the novel Peel My Love Like an Onion, praised by Publishers Weekly for being “sardonic and seductive…[a] compulsively readable narrative.”

Castillo has been a contributor to many anthologies, including The Third Woman: Minority Woman Writers of the United States, CuentosChicanos,and Goddess of the Americas, and her writings have been published in Frontiers, TheLos Angeles Times, The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post, among others.

Castillo is passionately involved in nurturing the voices of other authors. She is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of La Tolteca, an arts and literary zine dedicated to the advancement of a world without borders and censorship, and is on the advisory board of the new American Writers Museum in Washington, DC. Castillo held the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Visiting Scholar post at MIT, and was the Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College in Utah and the Lund-Gill Endowed Chair at Dominican University. In 2016 she was awarded the Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Award in Literary Arts or Publications by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. This award is given to Latinos/as who have contributed significantly to our understanding of our Hispanic community and culture through literary arts, scholarship, and publications.

Much sought-after for speaking engagements, Castillo speaks on the craft of storytelling as well as Xicana identity and culture. She lives in New Mexico.

Books

Reading Black Dove is like sitting down to an intimate chat with Castillo about growing up with one foot in your parents’ world and the other in your own.

Veronica I. Arreola, founder of Viva La Feminista

Praise for Give It To Me

It’s a gift when we find books like these. They are treasures where we can find our hardest experiences laid bare in front of us, as if to say, drink deeply and feel assured.

Lambda Literary

Praise for Massacre of the Dreamers

It is easy to accept traditions as a jail called Destiny, but you need courage to conquer your identity as a road to freedom. . . . Fighting for her past, fighting against her past, Ana Castillo helps clear a collective way out.

Eduardo Galeano, author of Memory of Fire and We Say No

Praise for The Guardians

The Guardians is a rollicking read, with jokes and suspense and joy rides and hearts breaking, mending and breaking again….This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience.

The Los Angeles Times

Praise for So Far From God

So Far From God could be the offspring of a union between One Hundred Years of Solitude and General Hospital: a sassy, magical, melodramatic love child…

Barbara Kingsolver

Praise for Goddess of the Americas

Marvelous… an entertaining read for readers willing to look outside traditional understandings of the Marian theology to a broader horizon in which the religious and the cultural intersect.

2009 Americo Paredes Award, Contributions in Literature, University of Texas-Austin

2006 IPPY Award, Outstanding Book of the Year, “Story Teller of the Year” category, The Guardians

1994 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, So Far From God

1993 Carl Sandburg Award, Fiction, So Far From God

1990 & 1995 National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowships for Poetry

1986 American Book Award, The Mixquiahuala Letters

Selected Writing

Selected Fiction

Give It To Me (The Feminist Press, 2014)

The Guardians (Random House, 2008)

Peel My Love Like an Onion (Doubleday, 1999)

Loverboys (W.W. Norton, 1996)

So Far From God (W.W. Norton, 1993)

Selected Essays

Black Dove: Essays on Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me (The Feminist Press, 2016)

Massacre of the Dreamers: 20th Anniversary Edition (University of New Mexico Press, 2014)

Books

Praise for Black Dove: Mamá, Mi'jo, and Me

Reading Black Dove is like sitting down to an intimate chat with Castillo about growing up with one foot in your parents’ world and the other in your own.

Veronica I. Arreola, founder of Viva La Feminista

Praise for Give It To Me

It’s a gift when we find books like these. They are treasures where we can find our hardest experiences laid bare in front of us, as if to say, drink deeply and feel assured.

Lambda Literary

Praise for Massacre of the Dreamers

It is easy to accept traditions as a jail called Destiny, but you need courage to conquer your identity as a road to freedom. . . . Fighting for her past, fighting against her past, Ana Castillo helps clear a collective way out.

Eduardo Galeano, author of Memory of Fire and We Say No

Praise for The Guardians

The Guardians is a rollicking read, with jokes and suspense and joy rides and hearts breaking, mending and breaking again….This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience.

The Los Angeles Times

Praise for So Far From God

So Far From God could be the offspring of a union between One Hundred Years of Solitude and General Hospital: a sassy, magical, melodramatic love child…

Barbara Kingsolver

Praise for Goddess of the Americas

Marvelous… an entertaining read for readers willing to look outside traditional understandings of the Marian theology to a broader horizon in which the religious and the cultural intersect.

Publishers Weekly

Video

New Mexico In Focus: Ana Castillo

Ana Castillo discusses Black Dove at the International Miami Book Fair

Ana at Moraine Valley Community College Library for their Celebrating Latino Americans series